Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Back to NYRB, they have a listing for Pilgrim Hawk which looks intriguing, but they note in particular that it is a classic American short novel, comparable to Faulkner's The Bear.
And since I've been on a short novel kick lately I'm curious what short novels are Buffista favorites.
For definition I'll use the standard Science Fiction prize rules for a Novella: 20,000 to 40,000 words. So a slim volume like Billy Budd or Heart of Darkness or Breakfast at Tiffany's. Something that might appear in paperback with a couple short stories to fill out the page count. A book you can read in one setting, probably in a couple hours or less.
My two favorite short novels would be
Miss Lonelyhearts
by Nathanael West and
Great Granny Webster
by Caroline Blackwood.
So what do you like in the short form? (Though not as short as a short story.)
Goodbye, Columbus.-Though that feeling is always full of envy because Roth did that at 24, and at 24, I just...kind of cried a lot. I borrowed from it a lot for fanfic, though, and have very mixed feeling about the people who read those stories and said "Gee, you should really be a writer," because it's kind of like asking Fred Armisen to really run for President.
Probably
A Christmas Carol,
but there's also
Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, Bartleby, A Boy and His Dog,
Kuttner and Moore's
Vintage Season, Coraline,
the four Sherlock Holmes novels...
Of what hasn't already been mentioned (Vintage Season is without peer, as is just about anything by Kuttner and/or Moore):
Jane Austen's Lady Susan is a fine short epistolary novel.
James Clavell's King Rat is probably too long to really qualify, but it's a brilliant depiction of life in a WWII Japanese POW camp.
Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase looks longer than it reads. It's another epistolary (more or less) novel of a young teacher's first semester out of college, teaching in a NYC public school.
Is a short novel the same as a novella? I love Colette's Gigi (never seen the film.)
Favorite short novels would be:
Bonjour Tristesse,
Francoise Sagan
The Haunting of Hill House
and
We Have Always Lived in the Castle,
Shirley Jackson
Of the top of my head,
Shopgirl
by Steve Martin
and
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
by Lorrie Moore come to mind.
Maybe Lansdale's Mad Dog Summer.
From looking at lists of novellas, I think the format doesn't work for me very well -- there are certainly some I like, but I prize things I can reread, and with novella length fiction I'm probably going to remember most of the details, unlike with a novel, but it'll still take a while to get through, unlike a short story. So even if I'm like, "Oh yes, that was good," I'm rarely in the mood for them.
I liked The Body Artist and it worked well in the short format.
So what do you like in the short form?
Tea With the Black Dragon
-- R. A. MacAvoy
